But that was little consolation as she thought she had a better car. She had to pit under green because of trash on the grille of her car, and then made contact late in the race with Marcos Ambrose, which left her angry at Ambrose as well as with Gilliland.

“He tries to take me out every time,” Patrick said over her in-car radio about Gilliland, a communication that was broadcast on the Fox telecast. “Tell his spotter that I’m coming after him if he does it again. In fact I might just do it right now.”

Gilliland, through a spokesman, had a brief response: “Shut up and race.”

Patrick did not speak to reporters after the race — typically she will do a brief interview if media are at her car after the race — but released comments through a spokesman.

“It’s disappointing because I think we could have had a much better finish with the Go Daddy car, but (trash on the grille) is one of those things that’s out of our control,” she said. “The pit crew was awesome.”

Having finished eighth in the restrictor-plate race at Daytona and 12th on the short track at Martinsville, the 25th-place finish was her best race this year on a track that relies primarily on downforce.

“Be proud of yourself,” her crew chief Tony Gibson told her over the team radio at the end of the race. “You drove a hell of a race today. You can’t do nothing about the grille there, so be proud of yourself.

“You hung in there all day. You did a great job on restarts. You had a good car. We know we should have been about 15th. We made some gains, we’ll learn and go on.”

Patrick responded: “The track tightened up. We could have kept up with it better.”

That possibly could have been the result of damage to her car after the contact with Ambrose.

“We started out pretty good, but we just got tight in the second half of the race,” she said in the postrace statement. “We had a tire rub at one point and issues with the splitter from some contact we made.

“The trash on the grille was what really hurt us today. The temps went way high and we had to pit to pull it off. That put us two laps down.”

Gibson said contact with another car resulted in the splitter getting knocked to the ground, which caused the tight conditions. Then the grille issue hurt more.

“We made improvement and the pit stops were good, but you can’t do anything about the trash on the grille,” Gibson said. “It’s just one of those things we just can’t control. That’s just part of it.

“But the bright side is that we finished again and got a lot of laps in and we made some improvements and made a lot of gains. I felt like today was a positive day.”